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I Am No Longer Speaking at RustConf 2023 thephd.dev
The wrong people are resigning gist.github.com
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atoponce
3 months ago
Batten Down Fix Later graydon2.dreamwidth.org
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carlmjohnson
3 months ago
On the RustConf keynote blog.rust-lang.org
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mperham
3 months ago
Flagging this as off topic.
I think it’s interesting and deserves to be discussed somewhere, but this isn’t it. It’s drama in a tech scene, not tech.
As far as I can tell there basically isn’t a good place with /r/rust deleting all comments, and every other forum I know of either considering it off topic or being overly general to be a good place to host rust community discussion of rust-lang politics (e.g. HN). I would be interested if anyone could point me to a good comments section for this.
I’m leery of hyperbolic responses, but it seems basically fine to have this story here, especially if it’s not getting discussed elsewhere. It sounds like something really weird happened with conference planning overlapping feature developmen. It’s definitely a messy example of setting direction on a software project, which is topical. Maybe more of the people involved will choose to explain their perspective and motivations so we can learn more.
Let’s try not to get too excited, and remember that even if we don’t know why something happened we can be kind to the people involved.
I agree. For a bit of context, the person in question led the C23 standard effort, has contributed several recent C++ standards, and is now doing interesting explorations for future evolutions of Rust. He’s a prolific (and talented) language designer and would make a fantastic keynote speaker at any conference. When I organise conference keynotes, I always aim to find someone outside the core community who can give a different perspective and it sounds as if he’d be perfect for RustConf.
It sounds as if he’s been poorly treated here and it would be good if the extra visibility causes the conference organisers to be a bit more transparent.
It sounds like you’re agreeing because you sympathise with this guy. I kind of do too, although I have more mixed feelings about his work on C23. But it’s not relevant. You’re basically asking for this post to stay so that lobste.rs can be the torch and pitchfork store.
Hard disagree–this is dirty laundry and community drama. There is no code being discussed, there is little actionable information here since most readers are presumably not the author or the people responsible for the conference decision, and its value here is basically for rubbernecking.
As much as I enjoy the Rust community derping, this is not something that needs to take up space here. It’s already covered on both reddit and the orange site.
I agree with you! This is just community drama and the only difference from a Twitter-flamethread is that it has been put on his personal blog. Much more interesting articles covering non-tech have been deleted here on Lobsters, so I hope @pushcx reconsiders this.
On the contrary, I hadn’t heard of this compile time reflection work prior to these events. It seems someone doesn’t like the tech and is attempting to turn it into drama. I would be surprised if the motivation wasn’t in part to make people consider the drama prior to considering the tech. We could do well to use this as an opportunity to discuss the compile-time reflection tech.
That sounds like it would be an excellent–different–submission.
🤷🏾♂️
If we’re gonna really stick to this rule, the rant tag absolutely has to go.
Or at the very least, the bar for accepting a rant has to be raised a couple of kilometers.
Rants have improved my technical ability before.
The existence of some “good” rants was already addressed in the parent comment:
I for one appreciate this being posted here. Rust has promise but it is also a tech cult, and when you have a cult, abusers jump in and start playing games with the resulting surplus of credulity.
Every open source project in a social experiment where the technology and the community are joined at the hip. Treating this as off-topic displays profound naïveté about how the sausage is made, and just yields the playing field to abusers.
Someone got their keynote talk downgraded to a regular talk. This constitutes abuse?
No, someone got invited to do a keynote and then under mysterious circumstances the people who invited them changed their position in a way that raises many questions, suggests jealousy and turf war, and a fight over who gets to be seen as credible. Either you didn’t read op very carefully or you’re playing exactly the kind of games I’m alluding to.
There are two kinds of people in the world. People who think status and titles derive from respect, and people who think respect derives from status and titles.
The first kind sees a keynote speaker as someone who has already earned the right to be there because they are a credible authority. The second sees a keynote speaker as a person who is about to be elevated in authority and influence, and will see the appointment as instrumental.
Perhaps a third kind of person exists, who sees both keynote and regular talks (I’ve done both) as not really that big a deal in either case? Oh sure, this conference is more prestigious than the ones I’ve given talks at. Still. It’s a talk! You can just create one and upload it to youtube if you really have something to say. Primarily they should be for the benefit of other people. Rarely do they have more than a few months’ worth of legs.
A new perspective on this, which largely confirms and reinforces the sad story: https://www.jntrnr.com/why-i-left-rust/
For context: the author of this blog post was the first-named author on a recent overhaul of Rust’s governance and is/was¹ on the Rust Core Team, which was the top of Rust’s government before that overhaul.
(¹ their resignation doesn’t appear to have been processed yet)
The speaker has responded: https://pony.social/@thephd/110446817486174177
I got confused by the linked post and the summary here https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/13sqdt7/comment/jlrmfar/?context=3 made more sense.
My opinion is that the Rust Foundation, which is bankrolling the project, took a logical course of action. If I was on the conference committee, and wanted to still highlight the work with a keynote, I might have first asked the speaker to emphasize that work wasn’t officially part of the roadmap. OTH the keynote slot is probably being taken by work the foundation considers more solidly central.
Fun bit of drama to read on the can. Did I become a better programmer by reading this. Probably not.
The Rust Foundation wasn’t involved in this decision (as far as anyone knows), the Rust Project was. Two different groups of people.
Thank you for the clarification!
Shouldnt this be a comment in the main topic ( https://lobste.rs/s/snaabl/i_am_no_longer_speaking_at_rustconf_2023 ) since that is less than a week old?
This is some interesting/random thoughts on governance from the original author of rust, in response to the various links on this thread: https://lobste.rs/s/snaabl/i_am_no_longer_speaking_at_rustconf_2023
Although I appreciate that the team responsible publicly admits that they made a huge mistake, I wonder when and why all reputable open source projects have shifted their focus from actual technical merits to “conferences” and codes of conduct. I am not surprised that large software corporations still lead the market. They don’t have conferences and codes of conduct, they actually write some code.
Of course they have, it is called Human Resources division.
Honestly, after all that fuss again I do not want to hear apologies once again, what I want to see is heads on the pikes for people who are responsible for that stuff. From all what I have seen so far, there was one individual or small group of such that imposed themselves as a BDFLs without involving others in the Foundation. And sweeping it under the rug will not kill the smell of the crap, that need to be thrown out, and in this case, as loudly as possible to show people “hey, we had some bad actors, but we actively fight against them and we prosecute them with all possible power”. Otherwise it will be hard to gain any trust back.
I think it is relevant that people who actually care maybe shouldn’t just leave. Because that may have an alerting effect, but it also weakens the group of people who could do something against this. It gives the people that may be responsible for this even more power (to use back channels).
But most of the time drama like this arises it is actually less dramatic than it seems. Mostly because two groups are voicing their opinions very loudly after some miscommunication and wrong decisions led to hurt feelings.
I’m reminded of the evaporative cooling analogy: the people who care about better communication are leaving the in-group, and that will make the in-group less interested in communication.
I don’t fault those who are leaving, though. They seem conscientious, and presumably they have already done the calculus on whether this action will be a net positive. (And even if it was a net negative, I still wouldn’t fault them for leaving a role that they personally don’t want to be in.)
Agreed that better communication would go a long way toward defusing drama. The speculation is worse than the truth, as fasterthanlime said. But if speculation is all the community has to go on…
Response from the Rust government: https://lobste.rs/s/ec7t2s/on_rustconf_keynote